Chapter Stones
Stones
As I neared the chapel—winded and weak limbed, though the climb hadn’t gotten steep yet—I spotted Mr. Tregarrick coming down the path and stopped. His quick stride set my heart galloping.
I had half turned to escape him, as if such a thing were possible, when he, too, stopped, leaving more than a carriage length between us.
His eyes dipped to the bandage around my neck.
The rush of heat—the sudden memory of our bodies pressed together—came as a shock.
I took a slow and shaky breath, aware my cheeks were apple-peel red.
How these sensations and reactions to him confused and frightened me! One moment I hovered on the point of flight. The next, I longed for him to come closer.
As my eyes moved over him, I noticed the wound at his throat, just above the ruffled collar of his shirt—a small cross, charred into the skin. When he’d asked me to wear the necklace, how little I’d imagined I would use it to save myself from him.
The change in him took my breath away. The cool tones of his skin had warmed, and there was even a flush in his cheeks.
He wore his spectacles, but they rested low on the bridge of his nose, and how his eyes shone!
His skin, too, gleamed with youth, and even his hair had lost its ashy tint, leaving a rich, deep brown.
Everything about him was brighter and more alive—except his expression.
“Mina.” The word was a handful of earth tossed onto a coffin.
“I had not meant to disturb you again, sir,” I blurted out unsteadily. “I only meant to leave a note asking you to send your man to me. I’ve learned things in the last two days that you should know. Things that may help you.” I bit my lip. “But it will be much better to tell you directly.”
His dismay was plain. “You would put your life at risk to help me. Have you stopped to think why?”
His gaze burned into me. Even with some distance between us, I could see his eyes had changed their dusty cast for a glossy midnight purple. I dropped my gaze to the path at our feet, the hem of my skirt draping the rusty bracken on either side.
“I have, sir. I even considered whether I might be under a kind of spell.”
“Perhaps you should listen to such thoughts. They might be trying to save you.”
I looked at him. “Tell me, then. Is it a spell?”
With a glancing shake of his head, he admitted, “Not a conscious one. But there are creatures whose forms are designed to attract.”
It would explain much. But I wasn’t sure that his form, pleasing though it was, could explain my concern for him.
“Well,” I said, “my life is hardly more important than anyone else’s. I believe you are the only one with even a prayer of stopping this creature before it kills again, and I think I may have found it for you.”
His eyes went wide with shock. Slowly shaking his head, he said, “You are remarkable.” It didn’t exactly sound like a compliment. He tipped his head to my left, where a path branched away from the one we stood on. “Follow me down the heath so we may talk in the open,” he said. “Not too closely.”
I let out a breath. “Yes, sir.”
Footpaths led off in various directions over the estate. From below, you could see them snaking up the hill through the heather and around the dark blocks of granite. The path we walked on now would likely have been the same he’d taken when he carried me, unconscious, from the pool to the chapel.
Though the wall painting at St. Gomonda made it seem even more likely the heath creature had been the one that attacked me and the others, I had to wonder why it hadn’t renewed its attack during the close visit to our cottage. The creature had simply watched me and then disappeared with the fog.
We were almost to the pool now, and Mr. Tregarrick’s kindness in coming to my aid that day reminded me of another kindness he’d done me.
“I wish to thank you, sir,” I said, “for sending your man with your letter and the tasseography book. It was very thoughtful of you.”
“Please call me Harker,” muttered my companion. “The formality between us has begun to feel silly. And you’re welcome to the book. I thought you might get some use out of it.”
“Indeed, I already have.”
“I appreciated the author’s straightforward way of explaining things. Books on alchemy are often opaque and labyrinthine.”
“You’ve read it?” I asked, surprised.
“It was in my library,” was his puzzled reply.
“Well, yes. But I guess it seems to me your interests are more . . . scientific.”
“Alchemists are naturally curious. And alchemy has no contempt for spirituality.”
“I see.” And mostly I did. Sometimes his explanations went right past me, but the more time I spent with him, the easier I found him to understand. “Did you try it yourself?”
“I did, in fact.”
“How did you get on?”
He let out a breathy sound that might have been a laugh. “Not at all. It seems I don’t possess the gift for it, despite having a great quantity of spent tea leaves at my disposal.”
I laughed, and I took a few quicker steps so I wouldn’t have to speak so loudly. “Mrs. Rochester says that besides tea leaves, you only need study and practice.”
“I fear my mind may be too busy to really excel. I got the sense a certain sleepy quality of thought was conducive.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed again. “Are you saying you weren’t quite lazy or simple enough?”
“Not at all, Miss Penrose, only that—”
“Mina,” I corrected, because I found I enjoyed teasing him, and also I had no wish to return to “formality.”
“Mina. I meant that I struggle to settle my thoughts. You’d think after so many years, I’d run out of things to think about.”
“I’d expect rather the opposite.”
“Mmm.”
We’d come to the pool, and I looked around with new eyes after what Mr. Hilliard had told me.
There was the wide slab where I’d often sat, and where I’d hit my head, but the ground here was also littered with blocky stones of varying sizes, their lines softened by time.
Especially telling were the small mounds with edges and corners of stones showing.
I guessed that earth and grasses had gradually filled in the crevices among piles of masonry bricks.
Moving to stand beside the slab, I noticed a dark stain on the granite that hadn’t been there before.
My blood. Harker stood a few arm lengths to my left, avoiding my eye.
I tried to conjure the missing memory—him lifting me in his arms, carrying me to the chapel.
Would he have scooped me up without thinking, then realized the risk, or the other way around?
Harker is always thinking.
Yet how well I knew that he could be taken by the moment.
Shivering, I glanced up at the sky—evenly gray now, with no breaks, the air cooler than it had been.
Mist almost completely hid the surface of the pool, as if the water were hot rather than cold.
Mysterious patchy fogs were common on the Tregarrick estate.
Sometimes you could watch them gather here when there was no fog to be found in the village.
Da once told me it likely meant the land was more bog than heath—even more reason to stay off it—but I’d crossed it enough times to know better.
Finally I looked at Harker. He stared into the mist, lost in his thoughts. “The constable told me these stones are all that remain of the old manor,” I said. “Is that true?”
His gaze flitted in my direction. “So said my father. All but the moorstone burned, and much of that was carted away for other uses over time. The house was never rebuilt.”
“Do you know why?”
He took a slow breath. “While the chapel was under construction, laborers claimed they’d seen a devil on the estate.
” I half gaped at him. “Things began to go wrong. Worker injuries and missing tools. My ancestor’s wife fell ill while she was carrying his child, and shortly after the chapel was completed, she died in childbirth.
The chapel was to have been a gift to the church, but the bishop refused it, ruling officially that there was a demonic presence here.
Then the manor burned, and my ancestor and his motherless son moved into the chapel.
There was no talk of rebuilding after that, whether because my ancestor was too bereft after his wife’s death or because no workers would set foot on the place, I cannot say. ”
My next question came out in a rush. “Have you seen the wall painting in St. Gomonda’s bell tower?”
He looked at me, brows lifting. “Of the saint slaying the demon?”
“I was looking at it today with Father Kelly. You remember what the demon looked like? The thing with tree branches growing from its head?”
His gaze drifted again as he sifted through memories.
“It’s been many long years since I set foot in the church.
My father told me it wasn’t safe for us, and we never attended services.
But as a boy I was curious about the other tower that we could see from ours.
” He smiled faintly. “I wondered whether another boy might live there. Roche Rock was not an easy place to be a child.”
“You were lonely even then.”
“I was.” The matter-of-factness of the reply tugged at my heart. How well I knew that loneliness, like a ghost that met you each morning and followed you through your day. I couldn’t imagine decades of it.
“My father left the estate very rarely, but one night he had some business with his steward, and I made up my mind to visit the other tower.” Sighing quietly, he looked down.
“It crushed me to discover it empty. I had brought a lantern with me, and I climbed up to the bell, just to be sure. I noticed the painting as I was leaving, though I wasn’t tall enough to see it well.
I recall the ‘demon’ better than anything else about it.
Years later, when my father told me the story of our chapel’s construction, it seemed to me that the story of St. Gomonda had likely provided inspiration for the church’s belief that an evil presence dwelled here. ”
“It’s real, Harker. I’ve seen it.”